The present disclosure relates generally to information handling systems, and more particularly to a load balancing system for multi-homed information handling systems.
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
In many situations, information handling systems such as, for example, client devices, may be connected to more than one computer network in a configuration that is referred to as “multi-homing”. Such configurations may be provided in order to, for example, increase the reliability of an Internet Protocol (IP) network when client devices are served by more than one Internet Service Provider. In many networked systems including multi-homed client devices, it may be desirable to perform load balancing in the networked system to distribute workloads across multiple computing resources such as, for example, router devices. However, the use of load balancing in networked systems with multi-homed client devices can raise issues.
For example, in networked systems that communicate using the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), client devices may select and use a default router device from a plurality of router devices in order to communicate outside of their Local Area Network (LAN). The selection of the default router device from the plurality of router devices is made in response to router advertisements from the plurality of router devices. However, that selection is typically random, which can result in several client devices selecting the same default router device, and can lead to unpredictable traffic flows where a majority of the network traffic flows through a single router device when multiple router devices are available.
Conventional solutions to load balancing router devices in a multiple router device system include the Gateway Load Balancing Protocol (GLBP), which is an extension of the Virtual Routing Redundancy Protocol (VRRP). However, when using GLBP in an IPv6 networked system, the default IPv6 link-local address may be shared by each of the devices, which results in clients selecting source addresses using, for example, source address selection based on the next hop address. However, the use of source address selection based on the next hop address can lead to unpredictable source address selection, and the selection of an incorrect source address will cause the traffic from that client device to be dropped by an Internet Service Provider performing source filtering. Solutions such as Virtual Link Trunking (VLT) suffer from similar issues.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an improved multi-homing load balancing system.